Traditionally the surround sound field is created either by means of dedicated surround sound recording equipments, or by professional sound mixing engineers or software applications that pan sound sources to different channels. Neither of these two approaches is easily accessible to end users. In the past decades, the increasingly ubiquitous mobile devices, such as mobile phones, tablets, media players, and game consoles, have been equipped with audio capturing and/or processing functionalities. However, most mobile devices (mobile phones, tablets, media players, game consoles) are only used to achieve mono audio capture.
There have been proposed several approaches for surround sound field creation using mobile devices. However, those approaches either strictly rely on access points or fail to take into consideration the nature of commonly-used, non-professional mobile devices. For example, in creating a surround sound field using an ad hoc network of heterogeneous user devices, the recording time of different mobile devices might not be synchronized, and the locations and topology of the mobile devices might be unknown. Moreover, the gains and frequency responses of audio capturing devices may be different. As a result, at present, it is incapable of generating a surround sound field effectively and efficiently by use of audio capturing devices of everyday users.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need in the art for a solution capable of generating the surround sound field in an effective and efficient manner.